Drifter obsessed with younger girls

Ian Huntley's very ordinary world was turned upside down when his wife ran off with his younger brother and his mother set up home with a lesbian lover.

The traumatic events in the mid-1990s brought him close to a complete breakdown and he embarked on a string of affairs in which he preyed on younger women and underage girls, seeking to control and manipulate them.

He impressed the youngsters by projecting an image of success, wearing suits and telling tall tales about his past, including that he was a pilot and a bodybuilder.

But, in reality, it was all a facade which hid his own failings as he drifted aimlessly between bedsits and low paid jobs.

Huntley was born on January 31, 1974, and brought up in the working class port of Immingham, near Grimsby, by parents Kevin and Lynda, with whom he later worked in a Heinz factory.

A weak child, hospitalised by asthma and bullied, he went to Eastfield Primary school, then Healing Comprehensive, where Maxine Carr was later a pupil, and finally Immingham Comprehensive.

He was ridiculed by other pupils as 'Spadehead' and the 'white cliff of Dove' because of his large forehead and was in the bottom class for most subjects.

Classmates remember a child who was "quiet", a "bit of a loner" and a "hanger-on" who ran to teachers if provoked.

Little about him stood out apart from his having had to be taken to hospital several times after asthma attacks.

A friend, Yvonne Puck, now a mother of two, said Huntley was an 'average lad'.

"He just blended into the crowd. He wasn't outstanding at anything. He was just your normal, average kid growing up," she said.

But in the years immediately after he left school it seems Huntley's obsession with younger girls was already materialising.

Schoolgirls would give him money to buy alcohol for them in off licences and, after his arrest at Soham, one woman came forward to say she had been French-kissed by Huntley when he was 18 and she was 13.

She said he had tried the same with some of her friends.

In December 1994, Huntley met 18-year-old Claire Evans, embarked on a whirlwind romance and asked her to marry him.

At least one local girl had already turned him down.

They wed within weeks at a register office in Grimsby and went to live in a one-bed flat above an electrical shop.

But the marriage was over within days and Claire, an RAF administrator, moved out.

She later fell into the arms of Huntley's younger brother Wayne, who had been a witness at the wedding.

After much soul-searching Wayne, an engineer, confessed the relationship to Huntley, who was living with their mother at the time.

The cuckolded older brother flew into a rage, vowing never to speak to the younger, more successful Wayne or his wife again.

The love triangle became the subject of local gossip and Huntley was shattered, claiming to fellow drinkers in pubs that he had caught his brother and his wife in bed together.

His revenge was to refuse to get divorced until 1999, during which time Wayne and Claire stayed together.

In 2000 they were eventually able to marry at Thetford United Reformed Church in Norfolk in a ceremony much grander than the first wedding. Ian Huntley was not there.

Following the collapse of his marriage in 1995, Huntley moved round various cheap rented flats and dead-end jobs in Grimsby in what became a humdrum life.

His only release was his ability to pick up girls, generally young, in pubs and clubs.

Huntley's final partner Maxine Carr told jurors that one of his girlfriens had given birth to Huntley's daughter, now aged five, in 1998.

Another woman he was involved with was Rebecca Bartlett, who was 19 when Huntley was 23.

She lived with him for nearly six months, during which time Huntley was calling himself Ian Nixon.

Bartlett says he flew into a rage when she told him she believed she might be pregnant - and the relationship ended.

During this turbulent period in his early 20s, Huntley's parents, Lynda and Kevin, also split up and Lynda went to live with a lesbian lover Julie Beasley, who was nearly 20 years younger and a security guard at a factory where she worked.

The couple lived openly together above a shop.

This and his own turbulent love life took their toll and, according to friends, Huntley had some form of breakdown.

One said: "He couldn't believe what was happening to his life, everything he loved was turning upside down."

It was following the parental split that Huntley took his mother's maiden name and began calling himself Nixon.

His tendency towards being a Walter Mitty character intensified and he would tell workmates and girlfriends all sorts of stories about his past.

At different times he said he was a former RAF pilot pushed out on medical grounds, that his father had died when he was a child and even that he had won the Lottery.

He got jobs through a local recruitment agency, including working at a fish processing plant in Caistor, near Grimsby.